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New Why?
We (most of us, anyway) have been taught to ignore or interpret-away things like that. Muslims do that as well. And they should (and must) have the freedom to do so.

I've started re-reading (actually, first go I never finished it - oldest daughter borrowed it and it's just now returned) Hitchens' God is not Great. Even before that, I was struck by something eluded to by Dawkins. Why must we "respect" any religion? You can't control thought, people are free to "believe" whatever they wish. But that doesn't mean we should treat any of them with any degree of respect. I, like nearly everyone here I'd wager, was raised that anyone's religious views need to be respected. You hear that same drivel from people like the sitting head of the world's leading pedophilliacs association the pope, among others. I, like I suspect most, just accepted that "respect for religion" is one of those late 18th century ideals that are sacrosanct. But it's utter nonsense. I haven't heard anyone cite a decent argument as to why the free exercise clause should not be stricken from our Constitution. I've never heard a good argument as to why it is important to "respect religion."
New Respect is too strong a word.
re·spect
rəˈspekt/
noun
1.
a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.


I don't feel that way about religion. My feeling is more along the lines of the Golden Rule: You don't tell me what to believe, and I won't tell you what to believe.

"God is not Great" is a good book. Hitchens was a master of English and of constructing a compelling argument. But he was also wrong about quite a few things (e.g. Bush and the Iraq War).

Flipping into "old man yells at clouds" mode isn't going to convince fence-sitters. It will hurt the cause.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Re: Bush and the Iraq war.
I've been re-watching his many interviews on the topic and I have a different way of looking at what he was saying. So much so, that I'm not sure now. He was advocating a war against Islamic Cultists. And, as he said during a Daily Show interview, "You got to war with the President you've got." ;0) I think he was right with regard to the threat this particular religion posed. I didn't see it. I'll admit its beyond my comprehension how any of the desert religions have any genuine followers left and this bias caused me to be blind to the danger they posed. Their foundations wouldn't pass the sniff test of a mid-intellect 10 year old from the West. Christianity's prevalence in the West is strictly due to convention and I suspect in a lot of cases fear. Isn't it time, in the 21st century, that we alter our course? If we didn't, as a society, treat these idiotic fairy tales with legislatively dictated respect, there wouldn't be any marching morons of this particular stripe left.

On the Iraq War, about all I can say is Christianity had its crusades and moved past it. It's Islam's turn to have theirs and we should crush it before it starts. Why are we afraid to "declare war on religion"? We should mock it for all it is worth. We should teach our children to pay absolutely no heed to any clergymen, regardless of which mosque, church, synagogue, temple or chapel in which they spew their nonsense. We don't really even have to go that far. All we've got to do is ask them, "Does what he's saying make any sense to you at all?" 95+% of them will say "No."

New Meh.
(That's a good word. Sorry I over-use it. ;-)

The Australian (from 2008):

Hitchens defending himself:
[...]

We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war".

We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam or a decision to have done with him.

The President's speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.

That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups.

Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had believed or than the Bush administration had suggested.

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself.

But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale.

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.

The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.

A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.

The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.

Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.

Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Gaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much larger than anticipated) stock of WMD, if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship. None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty, and unintended consequences of their own.

I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

Nonetheless, the thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadis), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur.

Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say attempt rather than do, which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice". But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited.

We were already deeply involved in the life and death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.


His heart was in the right place, but his refusal to accept that Bush's invasion made things much, much worse (not just a few unfortunate consequences in an on-the-whole noble adventure) - and his searching for flakes of gold in the mountain of destruction that Rumsfeld and Bush's people constructed - was and remains a severe blot on his legacy.

Cheers,
Scott.
New But why did it make things worse?
I think, and perhaps Hitch would agree, that for the sake of "respecting the religion of Islam" we didn't go far enough.

Personally, I blame Carter. What was he thinking when he cancelled the neutron bomb?


New a decent argument? How about hanging people for attending
tribal dances? That was sort of stopped by the courts over the last 60 years or so.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
New Fail to respect != commit atrocious acts.
I'm all for letting people have big pasta parties for the FSM, but I'm *NOT* for all of us pretending to believe that a belief in the FSM is sane. Nor am I in favor of inculcating the attitude in our young that "one must respect the believers of the FSM." It's horseshit. How does society improve if we teach that respecting horseshit is a sign of an enlightened society? Let 'em do whatever they want. Just don't let them have *ANY* say in how we are governed.
New Fail to respect leads to commit atrocious acts.
lack of respect equals contempt which leads to abuse
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
New You need to respect a person's right to be stupid...
where "stupid" is your assessment of their belief. It's a matter of tolerance. After all, some of your beliefs may be considered stupid by others and you want to be left alone to hold them.

You do not have to respect the stupidity itself. And certainly you do not need to accept actions based on that stupidity which affect you directly.
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Exactly. Well said.
New They have no such right.
     Fresh Air: some insights on th Zealots. - (Ashton) - (34)
         Thanks for the pointer. Transcript. - (Another Scott) - (23)
             He's a very wise man. Excerpts. - (Another Scott) - (22)
                 You can read that hand-waving virtually everywhere in the West. - (mmoffitt) - (21)
                     So you clamp down on Islam. Then what? - (Another Scott) - (20)
                         The structure of Islam is a major problem. - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                             I've understood similar things about Islam. But the Jihadist / Islamist problem is new. - (Another Scott)
                         I once shared your views. Not anymore. - (mmoffitt) - (17)
                             Meh. - (Another Scott) - (16)
                                 Gotcher mere Language solution, right chere. - (Ashton) - (15)
                                     I think we mostly agree. - (Another Scott) - (14)
                                         oy you! whats wrong with individual reappropriation? -NT - (boxley) - (1)
                                             Heh. Slippery slope and all that. (There's always someone stronger who'll take *your* stuff.) -NT - (Another Scott)
                                         Fair enough; we can agree to somewhat-agree on the pernicious Forces in play: - (Ashton)
                                         Why? - (mmoffitt) - (10)
                                             Respect is too strong a word. - (Another Scott) - (3)
                                                 Re: Bush and the Iraq war. - (mmoffitt) - (2)
                                                     Meh. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                                         But why did it make things worse? - (mmoffitt)
                                             a decent argument? How about hanging people for attending - (boxley) - (5)
                                                 Fail to respect != commit atrocious acts. - (mmoffitt) - (4)
                                                     Fail to respect leads to commit atrocious acts. - (boxley)
                                                     You need to respect a person's right to be stupid... - (a6l6e6x) - (2)
                                                         Exactly. Well said. -NT - (Another Scott)
                                                         They have no such right. -NT - (mmoffitt)
         Just started reading, have to quit for now, but ... - (mmoffitt) - (8)
             so according to you the KKK represents mainstream christianity so we - (boxley) - (7)
                 Neither Christians nor Mormons are openly plotting the overthrow of our government. - (mmoffitt) - (5)
                     whistling at a white woman is a good reason for a hanging? - (boxley) - (1)
                         Seriously? - (mmoffitt)
                     Um. Yeah they are. - (static) - (2)
                         Yup. -NT - (Another Scott)
                         Don't misunderstand me. - (mmoffitt)
                 You meant Aryan Nations. -NT - (a6l6e6x)
         Good one! Thanks, Ashton! -NT - (a6l6e6x)

Why did my head just get farther away?
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